


The Linguist and the Traveler

by Reyka_Sivao



Category: xkcd 1190 (Time)
Genre: Don't Have to Know Canon, Gen, Language Barrier, Languages and Linguistics, Misses Clause Challenge, POV Female Character, POV Inanimate Object, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 16:14:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1096008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reyka_Sivao/pseuds/Reyka_Sivao
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The sea sees all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Linguist and the Traveler

**Author's Note:**

  * For [amessofadreamer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amessofadreamer/gifts).



> Dear amessofadreamer: Thank you for such a cool prompt! This was a really fun fandom to work with, and I hope you like the tack I took here.

The sea was forever.

She was not one of the great oceans, constant and changing only at the pace of continental drift.  No, by their standards, she was small and hasty, though no less ancient.

Sometimes, she breathed out, and her waters filled the lowlands with liquid life.  Then she felt vast, when the giant, ancient creatures swam her depths, or later, when the curious two-legged creatures learned to trap air in their strange, curled vessels and ventured onto her surface.

She liked the curious ones.

They settled on her shores and sailed her surface and explored the fractal edges of the land she touched.

They built things, too, great towering hives and burrows where great schools of them walked and lived and died.  Sometimes they killed, too, great massive numbers of other two-legged ones, and they looked and learned and discovered new ways to kill.

There had been Great Deaths before, and the sea had seen them all.  She had liked the curious ones, but all species rose and fell in time.  There would be others.

The sea tired of vastness, and, slowly, she inhaled.

Gradually, the waters receded from their old shores, leaving behind first mud and sand, then weeds, then shrubs and four-legged animals and sometimes trees.

Forests grew as she inhaled, and creatures who walked moved in where her children had once swum.

And, slowly, the curious ones returned.

There were far fewer now, but the species had escaped the Great Death of their own making.  The sea was pleased to see them.

They came slowly, by ones or twos, or in small groups, on foot or on the backs of other creatures, greatly humbled but still alive.  They were, perhaps, less knowledgeable now, but no less curious.

The sea shrank down to a tiny fraction of her ancient size, and there she lay, watching the air-life that flourished within her ancient borders.

A few of the curious ones made it all the way to her waters, and she welcomed them.  Her waters were salty with age and the concentration of her nadir, and even the poorly adapted curious ones could float easily in the embrace of her surface.

Within the confines of her borders, most of the curious ones wandered, turning their insatiable curiosity into a cultural wanderlust, while others built small buildings and villages, never even knowing more than ancient stories and tales of their forebears’ towering cities of steel and concrete.

Outside those ancient borders, though, beyond the knowledge of either the wanderers or the villagers, a few of the ancient strongholds still stood.  Some had been maintained through the darkness, but the one the sea liked best had been abandoned.

It had once been a lighthouse, and then a lookout station before the last Great Death, when its previous occupants had abandoned it.

But it had not stayed abandoned—new curious ones had come, following old stories, and had discovered the old outpost and made it their own, teaching themselves to use what was left there and learning to understand the records that were left there.

The sea watched them as they lived and learned and made their home there, as they went out across the plains and hills and valleys that made up her ancient territory.

Gradually, as the curious ones looked at the world around them, they began to see the marks of the sea in the dry land around them, learning to read the story she had written in the sand.

The sea looked at them, and they looked back.

* * *

The linguist stood at her window in the highest tower of the guard station, looking out towards what was left of the sea the ancients had named Mediterranean.  The salty sea was little more than a lake now, but after studying the writing and maps of the ancients, and looking at the signs of the land around them, she had finally, irrevocably, understood why the ancients had considered that insignificant body of water to be the center of their world.

“Lady?”

The linguist sighed slightly and turned to face the uniformed guard.

“Yes?”

“Every group we are aware of has been informed and has begun to evacuate.  However, two travelers speaking an unfamiliar language have come up out of the floodplain.  We are unsure if there are others.”

The linguist sighed and looked back out the window.  In the distance, the shining thread of light on the water had already grown into a visible ribbon.

“It does not matter if there are.  It is too late.”

The guard nodded regretfully, and the linguist abruptly stepped toward the door.

“I will see if I can speak with them,” she said, and left the rising sea behind her.

\--

The sea had waited for an age.  She was as small as she could get, leaving aside much space for land creatures she had watched.

But now it was time.

For too long she had held herself back for the sake of curiosity.  Her children needed room to swim in her depths.  She needed to stretch her cramped waters over the land that had never stopped being hers.

With a sigh, the sea exhaled.

* * *

The waters were coming fast now—not faster than a single person could run, perhaps, but certainly faster than an entire village or tribe could be expected to move.

The linguist watched from her tower as the sea rolled in to meet her until the shore was only tens of meters outside her doorstep and the outpost was a coastal guardian once again.

The waters gave one final surge and backed away a pace.

“Medi-terra,” whispered the linguist, and offered up a silent prayer for those she was sure were lost.

So it came as a great surprise to her when the refugees came knocking at her gate a few weeks later.

“How did you escape?” she asked in her best approximation of their language, and from their half-understood answers, she constructed the story of their ride to safety atop the water itself.

She smiled, then, because she had not failed.  Everyone had been warned in time.

Everyone had escaped.

“You are welcome here, if you wish,” she told them.  “Your ingenuity would help us.”

She had to try several more times before she could get that across.  “Cleverness?” she tried.  “Inventiveness?”

When they still glanced at one another and shook their heads, she sighed a little. 

“You have good ideas,” she said.  “You make things work.”

She saw the light spark in more than one pair of eyes, and knew that she had been understood.

“Invent?” said one of them, the female of the original travelers.  “Invent-iv-ness?  Invent things we do?”

And the linguist knew she had found her first student.

* * *

They spoke often, and learned what they could of the other’s language.  It was not an easy process, but they gradually got to the point where they could both communicate reasonably well in the other language.

 “This place was what?” asked the traveler in the linguist’s language, not exactly incorrectly.  She still tended to fall into the word order of her own language whenever it was remotely allowable.

“This was a place for watching,” said the linguist in the traveler’s language.

The traveler frowned.  “For observing what?”

“They guarded the border,” said the linguist, pointing to the map to illustrate.  “This land fought with this land.  They were—”  She frowned.  “A big fight,” she tried.  “Many fighters, for a long time.”

“War?” offered the traveler.  “They were at war?”

The word was close to several cognates she was familiar with, so the linguist took a chance and nodded.

“They were at war,” she repeated, cementing the word in her mind.  “This land with this land,” she said, pointing, “and that one with these.”  She paused.  “There are other maps with other lands, all at war.  There were many fighters with many weapons.  They made dreadful weapons, and in one day, many lands died and the war ended.”

The traveler frowned.  “One day?” she said.  “You say…countries died?  How…?”  She shook her head, still having trouble with hypotheticals.  “How…is a weapon so terrible?”

“Many died, but not all.” said the linguist, and then sighed, not sure if she could explain.  It had taken their best scholars years to come close to understanding, and even they did not know _how_ the ancients had done it.  Though perhaps that was for the best.

“There was a kind of stone, from deep in the earth.  It was…”  She shook her head.  “…hot.  It was _like_ hot, but more.  The old ones built machines to hold the hot rocks, and…threw them at their foes.”  Perhaps later she could describe airplanes and missiles. 

The traveler was watching with rapt attention and a little bit of disbelief.

“When the hot stones fell,” continued the linguist, “they hit the ground like fire—not like our fire.  This was like the fire at the heart of the sun.”

The traveler frowned.  “The hot rocks made sun-flame, and it burned them?”

“They were dreadful weapons,” repeated the linguist.  “For most of the war, no land would use them.  But then, one land did, and then they all did.”  She shook her head.  “The first fire killed many, but it was worse.  Sun-fire is poison—many more died in the months and years after the sun-fire fell.  Even now there are lands where the poison lingers.  The travelers who have gone in have all gotten sick with the same sickness told by the old ones.”

The traveler’s eyes widened.  “The cursed places?” she asked.  “The people in the hills said we were cursed.  They said we came from the cursed places, our—” she paused.  “The parents of our parents of our parents.”

“Ancestors,” supplied the linguist.

“They said our ancestors came from the cursed places,” finished the traveler.  “They would not approach us if they could avoid it.”

“They may have been right,” said the linguist.  “After the sun-fire fell, many fled the cities, and most were already poisoned.  That poison could harm their children, even if those children were not yet born.”  She shook her head again.  “But even if that is true, those children could not harm others by being near them.  It does not work that way.”  Trying to explain the difference between radiation sickness and mutation was beyond her at the moment.

The traveler frowned.  “That poison is…strange.”

The linguist nodded.  “It is.  Maybe later I can tell it better, but calling it a curse is not wrong.  They used forbidden knowledge to kill, and it harmed all of them.  Say the sun was angry that her power was stolen, if it will make people remember.  Maybe they will learn more from the tale than we know to teach.”

The traveler frowned for a long moment, and then smiled a little.

“That is a fine story,” she said, “but I would also like to know the other story when we discover more words to exchange.”

The linguist smiled.  She had chosen her student well.

“The let us find more words.”  She paused, thinking of cognates to the traveler’s language, and took a guess as to how the word might have come out.

“Tell me, does ‘hydrogen’ mean anything to you?”

* * *

The sea was peaceful.

Beneath her new surface, forests and plains quietly gave way to seaweed and silt flats as her children stretched their fins and swam through their ancient birthright at last.

Even then, though, the trees had their say—the largest of them stood taller than her surface, their salt-preserved top standing testament to the time she had given them.

The curious ones lived again on her shores, and again sailed across her to learn of the lands that been changed by her return.

New trees grew, new animals filled the empty places in the altered ecosystem, destruction once again made way for new life in the eternal dance of creation.

And the sea watched forever.

—

**Author's Note:**

> Behind the scenes note for the linguistically-inclined: The traveler's language (that the linguist is speaking) is portrayed as much with germanic roots as I could manage, while the linguist's language is supposed to be a descendant of an ancient romance language, so I used French and Latin roots for that one.


End file.
